Hey there,

Ryan here from The Growth Center.

In 2024, we helped one of our B2B SaaS clients build a sales pipeline worth $1.8M – from scratch.

Below, I am going to break down the entire evolution we took this company through. From never having booked a meeting or closed a deal from cold traffic marketing, to booking over 195+ demos from email marketing alone (and 6-figures in new ARR).

Let’s dive in:

Challenges they Faced

1. Low Performing Email Marketing Campaigns

Before working with us, this SaaS company was working with a different agency who was running email marketing campaigns for them.

The problem was – none of the campaigns they ran generated any results.

The email system they had set up to run the campaigns wasn’t configured correctly (lots of errors).

They were struggling with high email bounce rates.

And they hadn’t generated any leads or booked any demos from anything they were doing.

2. No activity in their pipeline

The second challenge they were facing was a completely empty sales pipeline.

This came as a result of not having any repeatable way to generate new sales opportunities from cold traffic.

The only deals they had gotten up to that point were deals that came from their existing network and referrals.

3. Struggling to Communicate their Message

This client also struggled to communicate their message to the market. 

They hadn’t taken the time to clearly define their product’s value proposition in a concise, easy-to-understand and enticing manner.

Not having your “elevator pitch” down is a recipe for failure when going out to the market to generate new business.

4. CRM not Set Up

This client had Hubspot, but it wasn’t set up correctly.

So even if they were generating new sales opportunities, they’d have no way to manage them effectively.

(A very important of the process)

They didn’t have any systems in place for tracking the follow ups they needed to do either.

5. Unable to Accelerate Product Development

The final challenge they faced was the inability to accelerate their product development.

This is an additional benefit of having a healthy, growing sales pipeline (that a lot of companies forget about).

Without consistently having new conversations with potential customers from their market, they weren’t able to continue making as many upgrades to their product.

They had limited data on what the market was truly looking for, besides just the reasons why their existing customers bought from them.

In the early stages of taking a product to market, every conversation you have with a prospect provides an opportunity to refine and improve the product, based on the feedback you get and what you hear the market needs the most.

Our Growth Hypothesis

Once we officially got started with this client, the first thing our team did was create a hypothesis for how we were going to build their sales pipeline from the ground up.

We knew we needed to install 2 key systems in order to see success:

1. A Lead Generation System

2. An Appointment Setting System

We needed a way to get in front of cold prospects and get them to show interest in our offer.

And we needed a way to convert them into a sales appointment once they showed interest.

To do this, we hypothesized that using automated direct response email marketing would yield us the best results.

We could set the system up fast (in 14 days), it’s cost effective, it doesn’t require any advertising budget, and we can still do a large volume of activity (in a targeted way).

So the next step was to execute our hypothesis.

Here is the step-by-step process we used to start consistently generating sales meetings:

Executing our Hypothesis

Step #1: Craft Foundational Messaging and Define the Perfect Customer Profile

The first step was to get clear on who we were targeting, and how we were going to communicate the value of the product to them.

This is always step #1 when you’re taking any offer, product, or service out to a cold market.

We sat down with the CEO of the company and filled in our “Go-to-Market Setup” document.

This document helped them clearly define their product’s core value proposition, along with exactly what their perfect customer profile looks like.

Getting this information written down gave us the clarity we needed to create our first email marketing campaigns for this client.

Step #2: Automated Outbound System Setup

We set up a fully automated Email Marketing System using SmartLead to book demo calls with qualified prospects from the target market.

This consisted of:

1. Purchasing Secondary Email Domains

2. Setting up Email Accounts using Google & Microsoft

3. Uploading the Email Accounts into SmartLead to Automate Email Sending

This system allowed us to book highly qualified sales calls without spending a single dollar on advertising costs.

As a 100% bootstrapped company, this was extremely effective for our client.

Step #3: Campaign Launch and Continuous Weekly Refinement

The next step in the process was launching our campaigns.

We used our Perfect Customer Profile to build segmented lead lists with StoreLeads and Apollo.

And we used the foundational messaging to craft short, to the point email plain-text email scripts.

We loaded the lead lists into SmartLead, along with the copy, and launched the campaigns.

Each week, we created new campaigns to test different segments of the market, and different messaging – to see what approach was working the best.

It took us a few weeks to get traction initially, but once we found our winning scripts, things began to snowball.

In our best month, we generated 65 new MQLs – all from email.

Step #4: Installed a High-Converting Appointment Setting Process

Once we started consistently generating MQLs from our campaigns, the next step was to focus on converting the leads into booked calls.

The appointment setting process we installed consisted of setting up automated reminders in Slack when a new opportunity was generated from our campaigns, so we could reply in under 5 minutes.

We also created a few reply templates to use when we replied back to prospects – to give them more context about our product and to “sell” them on the meeting.

This is how we were able to convert over 50% of the leads we generated into booked calls for this client.

Step #5: CRM Integration for Sales Management

The final step was to set up their sales pipeline in their CRM (Hubspot) and integrate it with our outbound email marketing system.

This reason for this is so our client could track every MQL and call booked in their CRM – and update their pipeline accordingly based on the results of the sales calls they took.

We tracked all the follow ups we did for each prospect in the CRM as well.

The Results

In 12 months (all of 2024), we generated 385 new MQLs from cold traffic, and converted 197 of them into booked demos.

As a result, they were able to close over 6-figures in new ARR – closing dozens of key logos.

Tool of the Day

Use LeadMagic.io to find the verified work email addresses of prospects in your target.

Quote of the Day

“People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it." — Simon Sinek

This is the exact process we used to help this B2B SaaS company build a $1.8M pipeline, from scratch, in 2024.

And this is the same process we’ve now implemented for dozens of other SaaS teams to help them drive daily lead flow, grow their pipeline, and close new customers.

Let me know if you have any questions about any of the steps I mentioned in this email.

Cheers,

Ryan

PS - If you’re a CEO, Founder, or Sales Leader at a B2B software company and you want a free consultation on how you and your team can implement this pipeline growth system, book a call with us here